Cape Town - National Assembly Speaker Thandi Modise on Tuesday acknowledged the challenges experienced in filling the board of the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA).
Tabling her budget vote, Modise said they have filled some vacancies in different Institutions.
She, however, said they have had a “good challenge” in the filling of the NYDA board.
“A good challenge because as the Houses we have learned not just to accept reports from committees. We have had to re-do the recruitment and placement process,” she said.
Modise also said they acknowledged that putting together adverts and interviewing candidates have not been a requirement for new members.
“We accept that we must take responsibility to recruit and place fit and proper candidates while not forgetting the things that alienate South Africans – ignoring gender inclusiveness, geographical spread, ignoring disability, and accepting that we are a multiracial society that has accepted non-racism.
“This means that Parliament cannot afford ill-prepared advertisements, non-representative shortlisting’s and unprofessional interviews.”
She said Parliament was responsible for making recommendations for strategic positions in the country.
“If Parliament lowers the guard, we end up with below par performance in areas where the poor and the vulnerable deserve protection,” she said.
Parliament stopped the appointment of the NYDA board and ordered the restart of the nomination process in February.
The appointment stalled in September after the National Assembly sent back the report recommending the candidates to serve on the board to the committee for further consideration.
This was after Modise received complaints of the selection process amid legal threats in some quarters.
Modise later received legal opinion which recommended that the process to appoint the board be restarted from scratch.
"The matter is contested by various parties who are threatening to take us to court. As I said in the last meeting, fewer people are in defence of the process," she said.
"The correct thing to do is to review the process taking into consideration what every complaint that is placed before us is saying and in that process being sensitive to the vacuum we talk about," Modise said in one of the programme committee meetings last November.
Political Bureau